Autumn in the House
by Greysilencepurplerose
Summary: Rukawa comes home from overseas to old friends, a much-missed environment and possibly a new love.


"Harusegawa University... you can't be getting around the place without a bicycle or spare time waiting for the shuttle service." Sendou murmured, running the tip of his index finger down the gilded surface of the bulletin board that detailed bus circuit schedules within the campus. He stopped at the lettering reading 'Southwest Link' and his lips twisted in a light grimace.

To his left, Rukawa quietly vocalized the two words running through his friend's head, "Forty minutes."

Hearing the words fall from Rukawa's mouth, the only female of the trio lifted her head from the map she had been briefly perusing moments before. Rukawa fell back as Sessy Daniell left the background and marched purposefully forward to plant herself right in front of the lightly distressed metal plate. Bright brown eyes darted back and forth in their sockets, reading and absorbing.

"Well, no one's going to wait forty minutes for a shuttle service that's going to spend another twenty-odd minutes making detours before dropping you off at the intended destination! How ridiculous," She furrowed her brows and scoffed but did not turn away from further scanning the bulletin board for a more convenient and definitely less time-consuming solution to their current problem: being stranded out in the middle of seemingly nowhere with nothing but sparse foliage and derelict architecture in sight when they were supposed to be at Harusegawa University's grand auditorium registering their attendance for their freshmen induction ceremony ten minutes ago.

"...We ARE on campus grounds, right? Here, look-"

Rukawa sidestepped her with the agility of a seasoned athlete just as Sessy threw her arm out to fish for a second opinion so that it was Sendou who got reeled into reading the school campus map alongside her. Seeing his companions' preoccupation, he wandered from where his companions stood, right onto the clearing behind their backs.

The reddish brown leaves and soil felt good under his feet as he trudged on. Twigs and dried acorns that had been stripped clean off the trees' wrinkly limbs by strong gusts littered the ground at liberal. To hear them crackle and strike up a fall symphony as these bits of foliage gave in and crumbled to grit under the soles of his trainers with each step that he took was oddly satisfying.

They were entering mid-fall in Japan. The last of summer's unbearably scorching heat waves had mostly retreated, reacquainting the delicate Japanese skin with the crispy coolness of autumn air and the cutting lack of moisture in the wind. Summer's signature emerald green shade had surrendered most of its lustre to seasonal change and begun to accumulate rust along its edges in earnest, coloring Japan dull green and russet.

The wind was picking up. It teased the hairs on the crown of his head and Rukawa lifted his chin, turning his face skyward to feel it on his skin and briefly scent its spice with his nose and the tip of his tongue. He always found himself internally comparing the autumn season in different countries in vain when he became stuck with a jet-setting lifestyle in pursuit of his career as a professional athlete. He was seventeen years old then. Five supposedly long years had gone by in a flash. Not once in those years were Haruko's words to him proven wrong. He always brought autumn with him, no matter where he flew and now, he was back in his home country pursuing his tertiary education and soaking in his favorite season and namesake.

Rukawa was unceremoniously jolted out of his nostalgia-induced stupor as both Sendou Akira and Sessy Daniell were interrupted from their increasingly verbal map-reading by a loud call straight in the trio's direction. The man occupying the driver's seat rolled down his window, stretched his turtleneck-covered neck out and called again, loudly as he was grinning widely, "Hey, Harusegawas, need a ride?"

"You three were stuck all the way in the backyard with outdated information. No one ever comes through here anymore now that they've got the bridge up and running, finally, after a good fifteen months! I'm Kuramine Arina, by the way." She beamed. The woman was brimming with infectious positive energy as she bounced up and down the coach aisle with her mid-length ponytail and clothes fluttering behind her back, occasionally stopping to briefly check on a certain luggage or speak face-to-face with Sessy. As a matter of fact, besides herself, the driver, the athletes and the American woman, the rows of seats were mostly filled with various paraphernalia such as bulky luggage, expensive-looking media production and recording equipment and movable wardrobes complete with make-up kits and shoe boxes.

"Really? We weren't aware at all of that..." Sendou croaked distractedly, eyes roving over a particularly luxurious-looking set of photography equipment, his hands itching to do the same on a physical level. The aspiring photographer and artist in him could almost hear it crying out to be in his hands. He could've cried when Sessy Daniell, looking extremely uncomfortable cramped up against his side, mouthed, "They're expensive," at him.

Meanwhile, Rukawa, looking the very epitome of boredom, busied himself with staring out of the window and his own thoughts.

"...Then they closed down the gymnasium and the area fell into disuse until it became a sort of unofficial drive-through for heavy-moving, like us in essential," Obviously, Kuramine Arina was an animated speaker, gesturing freely with her hands for emphasis, "which is far from being bad, of course, considering how we get to have all this traveling space to ourselves- Oof!"

She managed to interrupt herself with a well-timed yelp as the coach stalled and gave a sudden shudder all over, throwing all of its passengers off-balance whether they were seated or on their feet. Kuramine toppled right off her seat on which she had been kneeling and onto the floor while both Sendou Akira and Sessy Daniell felt as though someone had shoved two boulders forcefully into their stomaches, pushing the pair further back into their seats if possible. Rukawa had been in the middle of getting to his feet to stretch his limbs when the impact threw him off-balance with its power and abruptness and he knocked his head painfully on the low ceiling.

"Sorry! The engine died. Are you people all okay back there? How are the other stuff?" The driver yelled panickedly from where he remained seated at the helm and trying to re-ignite the engine but everyone else in the back of the coach was too preoccupied with their own physical recoveries from the fender-bender to bother themselves with answering him.

Sendou clutched at the back of his head, gently massaging that sore spot where he had rammed his head, with his thumb and groaning, slowly opened his eyes. Vivid red and yellow colors swam into his vision in a blurred whirlpool and stabilized as the haze of pain gradually cleared from his head and something else quickly registered. They were two opaque, small rectangular-shaped plastic films lying in his lap, each with minute holes punched through their top right corners and a red ribbon running through each hole. They appeared to be name tags, the sort to be found attached to luggage and serving as indication of certain ownership, to him and he was not wrong. The space above their heads was discovered to be crammed with carrying bags and suitcases when he peered into it.

"Oh? What's that you've got there?" Sessy snuck a questioning look over his shoulder and mooned, half-dazed from her recovery and rocking slightly in her seat from the coach ambling along on uneven ground. She reached a hand over his arm and picked one up. It felt hard and cool between her fingers, which were bathed in pale yellow light. "Hey, there's a name embossed on it. Here, can you read the characters? I only got 'Tsuki' and 'Ju'."

"It's read as 'Tsukioka Juri'." Sendou peered hard at the embossment and read aloud. "Not... like it's going to help me find out which luggage this name tag dropped off from!" He panicked visibly. They were minutes away from the auditorium, as Rukawa gauged unhappily from the sheer number of people in the vicinity in stark comparison to when they were still stuck in Harusegawa's gloriously empty backyard. He plugged in his earphones to his discman and stuck the buds in his ears. He always hated huge crowds.

"Hey, don't I know this name? Let's see... 'Akagi'... 'Haru'?"

Sessy had picked up the red name tag and was trying to decipher the embossed Japanese characters that would spell out the owner's name. "Rukawa, don't you know this- Hey!" She protested indignantly and shrilly in his ear as Sendou reached over and deftly snatched it out of her hands as she was leaning over the back of Rukawa's seat to show it to him.

Wriggling out of his seat and past a disgruntled Sessy Daniell, he reached up and hastily looped both ends of each ribbon to a name tag around the pulling handles to a random piece of luggage just as Kuramine Arina loudly announced that they had arrived at their destination without further mishap. Sendou hurried to alight from the coach only to be playfully shoved back into his seat by Rukawa.

The door reading 'Tsukioka Juri' across its burnished plaque swung open from the inside and a brown-haired woman stepped from the room. She was followed by another woman with a shock of curly dark hair tumbling down her back, who quickly fell into pace to her side with her armful of files and preparatory impressions bound together. The thick, heavy lettering inscribed on the latter's cover page read the interview's full title but only the words 'school alumni' and 'academic' were visible over Ayako's arm. The rythemic clicking sounds from their heels striking the floor echoed loudly down the empty corridor.

Akagi Haruko had been Ayako's junior back in high school and both women were now studying in the same course at Harusegawa University and writing for the school paper. They had been given the responsibility of interviewing a certain school alumna on the very day.

"Well, I thought that went well!" Sasaki Ayako exhaled loudly and said in a rush. "I thought she was rather professional about the entire thing, including that little slip-up with Question No. 4-"

"That was me." The shorter of the two women admitted, drawing an exasperated look from her curly-haired companion. "The question was badly phrased. It nearly ruined the interview. Imagine how disastrous it would have been if we had published it? How fortunate for us that she pointed it out and went to the extent of going through our program with us."

"Fortunate, yes, but enough of that-"

Akagi Haruko pivoted on the spot on her left foot as Sasaki Ayako grabbed her upper arm abruptly, both stopping in their tracks in the middle of the corridor, which was slowly beginning to fill with people. Haruko looked up at Ayako's face. The confusion filling her face deeply contrasted Ayako's suddenly severe expression and she opened her mouth but the latter beat her to it.

"Back there-" Ayako leaned her face closer to Haruko's cheek and whispered. "I was worried about you. When she counter-asked you why you were studying to become a sports journalist, you went completely still for a second."

Next to her, Haruko remained rooted to where she stood.

Ayako stared into her face concernedly. "You're doing it for..." She started hesitantly and soon found herself struggling to find the words to complete her sentence. "You're doing it so that-"

Back in the room both women had just exited from, someone else completed Ayako's half-finished sentence.

"-you can see him again. My idiot brother," Kusakabe Hisoka turned away from the pile of luggage on which she had been focusing her attention for a good portion of the interview, to stride briskly across the room to where the only other occupant remained quietly seated on the low sofa. She looked up from perusing her agenda upon hearing the word 'idiot' and allowed a small, bemused smile to curve her lips.

"He's coming back?" The tone of her voice was light, softer compared to Hisoka's rather brash tone even though they were addressing the same person. Evidently, said idiot brother stirred different feelings in both women.

"From New York. The idiot's having a ball of a time flying around at my expense. There had better be souvenirs." Setting down the various items in her arms, which included a shoe box and Tsukioka Juri's outfit carefully maintained in protective plastic covering, Hisoka stepped around the sofa behind Tsukioka Juri and started attacking her long hair, lightly mussed up from her exertions. "If you were going to change your clothes now, you should have dressed up for the interview. Sure, it was an informal session but what if they wanted photographs? Too much hassle to stop things in the middle for an attire and image change."

While she was nudging Tsukioka Juri's long hair into a presentable-looking updo befitting of her official duties, the latter took the make-up brushes to her face.

"Dressing overly formally would have put everyone on edge, as if the experience wasn't jarring enough for Akagi. Keep things casual and the interview flows. It did, didn't it? Good for them." Juri barely moved her lips and facial muscles as she spoke under held breath. A couple more brushstrokes along the gently sloping hill of her cheekbones and she was done with her make-up for the day. She quickly replaced the make-up brushes and various cosmetics in their case and rose, leaving Kusakabe Hisoka to clean up after her.

Juri emerged from behind the changing screen several minutes later, looking all dressed up in a formal monochrome one-piece, nude stockings which ran from underneath her black pencil skirt and a black blazer. The only item missing from her body was footwear befitting of her ensemble and overall corporate look. Juri padded softly on the balls of her feet over to the sofa where Hisoka had previously laid out a battered-looking, rectangular-shaped shoe box. Comfortably seated, she reached her hand down and removed the lid to retrieve a pair of burnished black high heels. Juri held one in her hands but did not put it on her foot. Rather, she turned it over and around in her hands over and again, studying the footwear with an odd expression on her face. Her furrowed brows and lack of action attracted Hisoka's attention.

"What's wrong? Why aren't you wearing the shoes?" She called from the other side of the room where she was putting their luggages together.

"They're the wrong size. I can't wear them." Juri answered simply. "We need another pair. Hisoka, will you check the size?"

When Kusakabe Hisoka went on rummaging fruitlessly through the small mountain of luggage for several minutes, both women knew that something had gone wrong.

"Funny," Hisoka finally called off her search, looking both exasperated and bewildered at once with the new situation. Footwear littered the area around her. "None of these are your size. They are all two sizes larger." Hisoka shifted to the side to make room for Tsukioka Juri as she made her way over. Juri reached for the name tag attached to that particular trolley, recognizing its yellow color and her name on it. Then, she grabbed the bag and flipped it over to further examine it, seemingly drawing a conclusion.

The luggage did not belong to her, she declared triumphantly. Little wonder why the shoes were all of a wrong fit. On her denim-covered knees next to her, Hisoka sat back on her haunches and glanced worriedly at the clock. Any further delay and they were going to be late. To have the year's valedictorian rushing to show her face at today's freshmen induction ceremony when she was supposedly the epitome of good composure, and the academic as well as social representative of Harusegawa University would be highly inappropriate and Juri understood it very well.

"Ring up Arina and have her shop for shoes in my size and send them over immediately to the waiting lounge in the grand auditorium. We'll go over now." Juri ordered in her bent-over position from putting her flats back on. Hisoka was on it immediately, calling up Kuramine Arina and relaying Juri's instructions. "Let's not bother ourselves with locating my luggage." Juri overheard Arina's loud voice vibrating from the handheld device and advised. Catching her reflection in the full body-length mirror, she chuckled lightly at how absolutely ridiculous she looked right now, all decked out in a formal one-piece and casual, well-worn flats.

Kusakabe Hisoka quickly exited from the room and was holding the door open for Tsukioka Juri from outside in the corridor when Juri stopped abruptly in her tracks. Pivoting swiftly on the ball of her foot, she leaned her upper body back into the room and picked up the pair of previously discarded high heels before turning away and hurrying from her designated dressing room.

The door swung shut.

Her muffled whisper of, "Just in case," hung briefly in the air before it melted away into nothing.


End file.
